The Unbroken Surface of Snow

Andrew Cronshaw released the beautiful Ochre back in 2005 [reviewed in #27]; seven years later comes The Unbroken Surface of Snow, which looks out from Scotland to the music of the far north. It features Armenian duduk master Tigran Aleksanyan, with whom Cronshaw has performed live over the last few years, as well as long-term collaborator Ian Blake on saxophone and clarinet and the Finnish singer Sanna Kurki-Suonio, who first worked with Cronshaw on 1993’s The Language of Snakes. Her voice features on the 34-minute title-track, described as an ‘epic Finnish runo-song telling the origin of the world.’ Collected from a 19th century kantele (lyre) player, the song tells of Vainamoinen, who is shot by an arrow and lies for seven years in the sea. His knee becomes an island where a bird builds a nest and lays a golden egg. When Vainamoinen stirs, the egg breaks and the yolk becomes the sun, the white becomes the moon, and the speckled shell the earth and the sky. A much better story than that Big Bang theory.

The five songs weave through traditional melodies, often in fragmentary form, drawn from English, Scottish and Armenian traditions. Among them is a version of the Scots Gaelic song ‘Gentle Dark Eyed Mary’, which Cronshaw first recorded way back in 1982, on The Great Dark Water (recently re-released on Cronshaw’s Cloud Valley label). Cronshaw plays the 74-string zither, as well as whistles, reed pipes, and the bawu (Chinese flute). The music is sparse, glacial and utterly beautiful, with a wide, panoramic sense of infinite space: you will happily lose yourself again and again in the title-track, a far northern wilderness transformed into sound.